Thursday, August 01, 2013

“You ride for 30 miles in the dark,” explained thirty-one year old April Moore of Southern Humboldt about the Tevis Cup, a 100 mile endurance horse race she completed last week. “That’s amazing… . You ride with a glow stick on your collar.. a headlamp for emergencies… . You put a lot of trust in your horse.” In the end, she said when you’ve trained a lot with your horse and things get tough, “You drop your horse’s reins and just let him bring you on home.”

Moore was the only rider this year to complete the prestigious race riding a stallion. She finished 49th out of 161 riders (less than half of whom completed the race in the required 24 hours.) She started out at 5:30 A.M. on the 20th of July and rode through the night completing the race at 4:21 in the morning. Although the tradition of the Tevis Cup started with a Wendell Robie and his Arabian stallion Bandos, stallions entering the race are relatively rare. Even rarer are those that finish. This year Moore and DB Bey Barz were the only pair to succeed.

This was Moore’s third attempt at the prestigious event. People come from all over the world to participate and finishing the grueling event is considered a huge accomplishment. Temperatures this year reached over 110 degrees and Moore described competitors “dropping like flies, throwing up in trash cans” as they attempted to complete the ride...